***
Kinzer felt something on his neck and reached out, snatching what felt like a wrist.
He opened his eyes.
Hayde gazed down at him wide-eyed. He didn’t move, remained perfectly still, seeming to suggest a surrender.
Kinzer glanced around. What was Hayde up to?
He lay naked on a cot, blood splattered across his body. File boxes piled along the walls. A crucifix hung above a desk on the other side of the room.
Still in the church.
Hayde sat on a stool, holding a bloody piece of cloth. Beside him sat a bucket of water.
“I was just—” Hayde began.
Kinzer didn’t understand. Shouldn’t he have used the opportunity to escape? What kind of trick was this? What else did he need from him? Was he armed? Had he carved up his body?
“Why didn’t you escape?” Kinzer asked, eyeing the flit with suspicion.
Hayde’s face turned scarlet. He glanced around uneasily. “I was about to… I was just…”
“You were just what?”
Tending to my injuries first?
It didn’t make any sense.
“I don’t know,” Hayde admitted. “But will you let me go so I can finish cleaning this off? It’s pretty bad.”
“Did you call someone? That’s what it is? They’re coming here, aren’t they? Shit.”
He released Hayde, rose to his feet, and scrambled across the room.
Hayde bounced up and chased after him. “I didn’t call anyone, okay?”
“Yeah, uh-huh, sure. Where the fuck are my clothes?”
“They’re in the next room. But, Kinzer, I didn’t—”
“You expect me to believe you just brought me here. Out of what? The goodness of your heart?”
He stared Hayde down, waiting for an answer.
Hayde was silent. He looked Kinzer up and down, like he was confused about something… like he had a question he was dying to ask. “Back with Fehrin,” he said, “when he was about to… you stopped him. Why?”
What did he mean why? He wasn’t going to just let him get raped. He hadn’t deserved that. No one deserved that.
“I was just trying to get him over to me so I could trick him into letting us out.”
Hayde’s eyebrows came together. “Really? You were planning on chewing his dick off all along?”
“Totally.”
As much as that wasn’t the truth, Kinzer didn’t want Hayde to know that he had really cared… that he saw him as more than just his prisoner. He didn’t want Hayde knowing he had that sort of power over him, because he was the sort of flit that would use it against him.
But Hayde’s skeptical look suggested he wasn’t buying it. “So rather than let him rape the shit out of me and then move on to you, you just happened to do it right away… this plan of yours that obviously was foolproof?”
